My mother was born August 5, 1897 near Princeton, Ontario. She was the youngest child of Margaret Ann MacLean who was born in Scotland and William Hurvey Laird who was born in Mt. Pleasant, Ontario. Margaret Ann had come to Canada when she was two years old.
The year was 1898 in the town of Great Falls Montana U.S.A. A baby girl was born to Hugh and Julia Jackson. This wee baby weighing 3lbs 10 oz was baptized Elsie Harlow, a sister to Pearl. After bringing Elsie home from hospital her devoted parents kept her warm and cozy in their little kitchen beside the coal and wood stove. She began to gain a little weight and would one day reach the height of 5 feet and weigh 98 pounds. Elsie and Pearls parents were Salvation Army officers. When Elsie and Pearl were three and five years old they were ready to join their parents on the carriers of their bicycles to ride from village to village to feed the hungry and save a few souls; “Remember the little drum and the tambourine called Dad” .We had fun riding on the bikes and playing the drums and the tambourine at each stop we made”. After three years of biking from town to town the family moved to Vancouver B.C.
People who knew and loved my mother in later life remember her as a compassionate, no-nonsense kind of woman who cooked marvelous dinners. Only I, as her only child, was privileged to know that beneath this gentle exterior, she was an adventure-loving pioneer with a tiger inside her.
When I was a teenager, alone with my boyfriend in the drawing room, we would suddenly hear Mother singing the Christian hymn “Rock of Ages” in her glorious contralto voice—a warning that we had to behave ourselves before she entered the room.
Her name was Amy Reeve. My brother Richard called her “Mummy” or “Mum,” but to me she was always “Belinda”, after a cartoon character named Belinda Blue-Eyes. She was born around 1899 in Tasmania, and was the youngest of four daughters and one son. At least, this is what I thought until a recent internet search revealed that she was actually born nine years earlier, on February 3, 1890, and was the fifth of six daughters and one son. Perhaps only four of the girls survived, and that is why I was never aware of the other two. I recall Belinda telling me that her father, a surgeon named Charles Frederick Reeve, was a Baron from England, who met and married my grandmother in Australia.